In general, the prior art is related to the area of minimizing the vehicle speed overshoot/undershoot using vehicle speed control systems. The prior art falls into two categories: The first category is that of providing a method to adjust the control effort of the speed control actuator by modifying the control law as taught by Oo et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 5,329,455. The second category provides a method for establishing or modifying the vehicle speed target path as a function of some system state feedback or driver input as taught by Isheda et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 5,646,850. Various target path modification strategies have been employed in vehicle speed control applications such as taught by Nakajima et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 4,598,370.
In contrast to vehicle or engine speed control system, the invention is related to a smoothing algorithm for throttle control applications for internal combustion engines. This smoothing algorithm has a much broader scope than the cited vehicle speed control systems, since vehicle speed control is but one of the many functions implemented with a throttle control system.
The invention is a throttle plate smoothing function, implemented in an input smoothing module, in which a step command is reshaped to provide smoother operation.